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On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen

Average customer rating:

Great book
Science, Technology, Food -- Cooked up for our Enlightenment
Straight to my classics list
Both fascinating and useful
Not enough stars to rate this book's importance to the kitchen nerd

On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen
Harold McGee
Manufacturer: Scribner
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Essays | Gastronomy | Cooking, Food & Wine | Subjects | Books

General | Cooking, Food & Wine | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0684800012

Amazon.com

A classic tome of gastronomic science and lore, On Food and Cooking delivers an erudite discussion of table ingredients and their interactions with our bodies. Following the historical, literary, scientific and practical treatment of foodstuffs from dairy to meat to vegetables, McGee explains the nature of digestion and hunger before tackling basic ingredient components, cooking methods and utensils. He explains what happens when food spoils, why eggs are so nutritious and how alcohol makes us drunk. As fascinating as it is comprehensive, this is as practical, interesting and necessary for the cook as for the scholar.

Book Description

Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking is a kitchen classic. Hailed by Time magazine as "a minor masterpiece" when it first appeared in 1984, On Food and Cooking is the bible to which food lovers and professional chefs worldwide turn for an understanding of where our foods come from, what exactly they're made of, and how cooking transforms them into something new and delicious.

Now, for its twentieth anniversary, Harold McGee has prepared a new, fully revised and updated edition of On Food and Cooking. He has rewritten the text almost completely, expanded it by two-thirds, and commissioned more than 100 new illustrations. As compulsively readable and engaging as ever, the new On Food and Cooking provides countless eye-opening insights into food, its preparation, and its enjoyment.

On Food and Cooking pioneered the translation of technical food science into cook-friendly kitchen science and helped give birth to the inventive culinary movement known as "molecular gastronomy." Though other books have now been written about kitchen science, On Food and Cooking remains unmatched in the accuracy, clarity, and thoroughness of its explanations, and the intriguing way in which it blends science with the historical evolution of foods and cooking techniques.

Among the major themes addressed throughout this new edition are:

On Food and Cooking is an invaluable and monumental compendium of basic information about ingredients, cooking methods, and the pleasures of eating. It will delight and fascinate anyone who has ever cooked, savored, or wondered about food.

Customer Reviews:

Great book.......2007-06-27

This book is such a pleasure- full of information and presented in an engaging, user-friendly format. My husband and I are really enjoying it!

Science, Technology, Food -- Cooked up for our Enlightenment.......2007-06-24

This is a wonderful book. McGee writes with clarity and passion, and brings to life all the "hidden" science behind food, nutrition, and cooking. Have you ever wondered what's happening when your barista creates a froth on your cappacino? Or why do eggs turn white when you apply heat? What's different between the process of creating white and red wines?

Anyone who loves cooking or food will get hours of enjoyable reading with this book -- and you'd be surprised how useful (and entertaining) this info is at dinner parties!

Note - this isn't a cookbook, nor is it a dry scientific text. But after spending time with it you'll never look (with enjoyment) at food the same way!

Straight to my classics list.......2007-05-23

I love to cook and have done for many years. This book taught me so many things that I'd never thought to ask, but have found invaluable in my cooking.
You really don't know what you don't know until you start reading McGee.
I highly recommend this book as informative, interesting and very readable.

Both fascinating and useful.......2007-05-08

I will keep this short and sweet as others have written excellent reviews.

Cooking is a new obsession for me. My goal is to be an excellent improviser: I want to be able to go through my pantry and fridge and make something creative and delicious, without resorting to recipes. I also want to be able to read a recipe and understand WHY it specifies certain ingredients and certain treatments.

This book is the best foundation for achieving these goals that I've yet seen. If you don't understand the science behind the food and the heat you add to or take away from it, your ability to improvise is limited.

This book is on my nightstand as much as it is in my kitchen. It's not just a reference manual, it's an enjoyable, fascinating, and intelligent read. Well worth the price.

Not enough stars to rate this book's importance to the kitchen nerd.......2007-04-24

The geekish approach to cooking was inspired by Julia Child and her colleagues at l'Ecole des Trois Gourmandes, and is carried proudly today by Alton Brown, Cooks Illustrated magazine, and any number of other people who prefer an analytical approach to their cooking than the doctrinaire methods of the days of teenage wage-slave commis and decades-long apprenticeships. While one cannot underestimate the importance of ramen noodles and Chinese take-out, the geek kitchen has come a long way since the 1980s, and this book is a big chunk of the reason why.

Harold McGee's original On Food and Cooking, published in 1984 and reprinted for years after, was required reading for anyone who wants to know what's going on in their food. In one massive volume, the reader followed many an ingredient from farm to supermarket, and then learned what happened when it came time to cook it. The second edition does not disappoint in that regard, updating much of the material to modern standards, adding things that were far less interesting than they were in 1984, and removing things that were obsolete. The book contains much historical material as well, including information on domestication of food plants, the history of such delicacies as chocolate and beer, and the world-changing effects of the development of things like sugar and coffee as commodities.

The heart of the book, though, is the extensive discussion on the properties and effects of different foods and substances -- the development of cooking to reduce toxicity of wild plants such as beans or manioc, for example, or the chemical intricacies of melting chocolate, kneading dough, or gelatinizing starch. Much attention is paid to doughs, sauces, and even whole chapters on milk and eggs, foundations of much of Western cookery. Many quick-and-dirty chemistry lessons give overviews of how cooks manage basic substances such as proteins, fats, starches, and pigments (such as the notoriously pH-sensitive anthocyanin family). At all times the physics of food preparation loom large in the book, culminating in an entire chapter on cooking methods.

I can't say one way or the other whether this book will appeal to you. There's a large contingent of people who prefer to get the benefits of geek cuisine without having to go in depth with the science behind it, and that's fine, though maybe a wasted opportunity (at least you know what you do will work, though). This book is for someone who wants to go a little more in depth and find out what's really going on when Shirley Corriher puts a vitamin C tablet in her sourdough or the ATK crew adds something odd like gelatin to a meatloaf. If you want to make your food's acquaintance on a deep level, you need this book. It was in 1984 and is now one of the most significant food books of its time.

The Curious Cook: More Kitchen Science and Lore

Average customer rating:

Master recipes and some food for your inner nerd
Sloppy Writing, Sloppy Science, Part 2
How You Too Can Apply Science to Food. Excellent Read
Curious Indeed
Fun and fascinating

The Curious Cook: More Kitchen Science and Lore
Harold McGee
Manufacturer: John Wiley & Sons
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Baking | Cooking, Food & Wine | Subjects | Books

Essays | Gastronomy | Cooking, Food & Wine | Subjects | Books

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Culinary Arts & Techniques | Cooking, Food & Wine | Subjects | Books

Reference | Cooking, Food & Wine | Subjects | Books

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On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen
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ASIN: 0020098014

Book Description

When Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking was published in 1984, it proved to be one of the sleepers of the year, eventually going through eight hardcover printings. It was hailed as a minor masterpiece" and reviewers around the world prasied McGee for writing the first book for the home cook that translated into plain English what scientist had discovered about our foods. Like why chefs beat eggs whites in copper bowls and why onions make us cry."

Customer Reviews:

Master recipes and some food for your inner nerd.......2006-08-30

If the author's mother ever told him to stop playing with his food, we can be glad he ignored her. Most of The Curious Cook is the happy result of what sounds like great playful time in the kitchen. There are essentially three focuses set out for this book:

*The first and most useful is a set of master recipes based on the author's experiments with food. The chapter on fruit ices alone is reason enough to buy the book and anyone thinking about buying an ice cream maker will have a lot more fun if they buy this book too.
The section on beurre blanc is both a how-to and a paean to this simple, quick and beautiful sauce.(chapter 6) Anyone who ever makes their own mayonnaise will be grateful for chapter 8.

*There is a bit of lab science:Chapter 11-the pleasures of merely measuring-is a recounting and tribute to the truly nerdy curiousity that some of us cooks develop. McGee's writing is fluid and friendly and it makes the laboratory-manual topics seem positively inviting.

*The third section is some food and health stuff that recalls things you've probably read in consumer food-oriented magazines a dozen times. You could skip chapters 12-14 without missing much.

The Curious Cook is definitely a bed table cook's book (rather than a kitchen cookbook), and a delightful one. It's hard to imagine a food-lover not enjoying it.

Lynn Hoffman, author of The New Short Course in Wine
and the forthcoming bang-BANG from Kunati Press

Sloppy Writing, Sloppy Science, Part 2.......2005-06-25

This book, a sequel to On Food and Cooking, is a look at the culinary world through the eyes of pop science. Despite a drastically different approach by the author this time around (real kitchen experiments as opposed to just spinning endless yarns loosely based on a myriad, unfootnoted sources), the results are similar: closer to Danielle Steel than Scientific American. If you liked this book's predecessor, then you will certainly like this one; if you thought it was worthy of a garage sale, you are unlikely to have a different view of this sequel.

This book has 2 distinct parts. The first one (190 pages) has eleven chapters, each focused on a specific subject and a series of related kitchen experiments that are fully documented. The nicely systematic approach of the author reminds one of a similar technique used by Cooks Illustrated magazine for their recipe development. The subjects are: cooking meat, oil splatter, simmering meats, green color of vegetables, de-gassing sun chokes, buerre blanc, hollandaise and bearnaise sauces, mayonnaise, artificial ripening of persimmons at home, fruit ices, and miscellaneous. Some of this material is of substantial practical value: the chapters on sun chokes and fruit ices have good recipes you can actually use. Those who are mystified by buerre blanc, hollandaise, or mayonnaise, or who have trouble making them, will find the appropriate chapters quite enlightening.

The second part, consisting of 6 chapters (120 pages) is mostly drivel. 3 chapters are devoted to the kind of stuff you can find in health magazines at the supermarket checkstand: dietary fat and heart disease, food and cancer, Alzheimer's and aluminum cookware. 3 chapters are devoted to a bit of culinary history: Brillat-Savarin, Maillard.

In the end, reading this book is fun, but I would not take the information it presents too seriously.

How You Too Can Apply Science to Food. Excellent Read.......2004-04-10

Harold McGee is probably the most widely cited writer in American culinary writing today. Alton Brown literally genuflects at the mention of his name and complains that he is hard pressed to find a subject on which Herr McGee has not already explored at some length. His major work, `On Food and Cooking' appears to be on the short list of Culinary Institute of America references for their students, next to Escoffier and their own references.

This work, `The Curious Cook', is a bit different that the other work, in spite of the subtitle `More Kitchen Science and Lore'. The larger book is largely theoretical. This book is largely experimental and its subtitle should be the title of the first and longest section `Playing With Food'. The lesson taught here is probably the single most important lesson you can learn in any endeavor. That is, when in doubt, try a little experiment. When I was studying philosophy, this largely took the form of thought experiments, not unlike the development of a Science Fiction plot. `What would happen if there were artificial people who were indistinguishable from biological humans. The result is the story `Blade Runner'. When I worked with chemistry, this step was obvious. Oddly, I had to relearn the lesson when I became a professional programmer. It took a few years and more than a few books to learn the value of prototyping code, even for some of the most simple algorithms. All this means is that when you cook, YOU ARE ALLOWED TO TRY THINGS OUT WITH THE OBJECTIVE OF SEEING IF SOMETHING WORKS. My favorite example is in making and using a simple bechamel sauce to make macaroni and cheese or creamed chipped beef without having the sauce break.

I am constantly amazed at the blissful ignorance behind some common misstatements by very good professional chefs who have established themselves as celebrity educators on various TV cooking shows. I suspect the most common is the statement that laying meat into a hot saute pan sears the flesh to seal in the moisture. This misstatement is the subject of McGee's first chapter, where with a simple kitchen scale, he demonstrates what should be common sense to anyone with some knowledge of physics. Application of high heat reduces the moisture in the meat. This essay was published before the Food Network was a gleam in network entrepreneurs' eyes, yet Emeril and Tyler and Rachael and even Wolfgang repeat this misstatement on a regular basis. The lucky thing about this statement is that searing meat or any other food for that matter, has a very important benefit, in that it develops flavor through caramelization and the Maillard reactions. By design or by chance, the explanation of the Maillard reactions come in the very last chapter of the book, providing the reason we have been searing food for millennia.

There are other books that deal with food and science. Some of the most recent and most famous are `Cookwise' by Shirley Corriher, `I'm Only Here for the Food' by Alton Brown, and `What Einstein Told His Cook' by Robert Wolke. All of these works are exceptionally good books. But, none of these works give the kind on encouragement and the kind of clues you need to find culinary answers on your own.

One warning may be in order. Science, i.e., the method of experimentation and observation is the most powerful method developed to answer questions and acquire knowledge, but it is certainly not enough to make you a superior cook. For example, I really like Alton Brown's `Good Eats' shows and I often use his recipes, but whenever I see Mario Batali do something in a different way than Alton, I invariably use Mario's recipe or method rather than Brown's suggestion. The heart of the reason behind this is that Mario Batali is a very, very good professional chef and Alton Brown is not. Preparing food is a fine mix between knowledge and artistic expression. Professional chefs know the best ways to do things to achieve the most desirable culinary result, even if they do not know the scientific explanation for why they do things in a certain way.

I will warn you that some of the essays in Parts II and III are a bit long on reflection and a bit short on practical application. I may even go so far as to say some of these sections are just a bit dull. In spite of this, the first section on `Playing with Food' plus the essays on aluminum and the Maillard reactions are all pure gold for the dedicated foodie.

Very highly recommended for anyone interested in food.

Curious Indeed.......2004-01-25

This is an odd sort of a book. If you were expecting to be enriched by lots of kitchen lore and simple explanations (which was my original aim) you would be disappointed. This book tells you much more about tidbits of history, physics, chemistry and physiology than tips and tricks for cooking and is, in truth, quite long-winded.

Now if you are also interested in the acquisition of knowledge of various sorts, common as well as obscure, and don't mind being the "most knowledgeable amateur" among your friends, this is an excellent source of information. The author spares no ink in serving up history, scientific theory and experiments (The famous oil drop experiment by physicist Millikan, a Caltech cohort of the author, was featured! Plus many of his own), findings in medicine, etc. in covering a subject, even "simple" ones like browning of vegetables by salad dressings.

If you managed through the first couple of chapters, you will probably go on, and you will quickly find that the author is a no-nonsense scientist (Ah! the Caltech imprint) and his stuff is well baked, so to speak. By the time you finish the book, you will learn much more than a few useful tips to augment your cooking skills, and find your reading time quite well spent.

Fun and fascinating.......2003-12-04

McGee says he wrote this book in part to inspire us all to think, tinker and experiment in our own kitchens and I think it succeeds. Maybe I'm just a geek, but I found his accounts of why spattered cooking oil ends up _inside_ a cook's eyeglasses or why persimmons are inedible until fully ripe to be fun and fascinating. The chapters on aluminum in the diet, the role of cholesterol in heart disease and how foods might cause cancer were deeply technical, but no less fascinating.

Average customer rating:

On Food And Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen
Harold; McGee, Harold J. McGee
Manufacturer: Scribner
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000KW94MI

Average customer rating:

ON FOOD AND COOKING the Science and Lore of the Kitchen
Harold McGee
Manufacturer: Scribner's
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000JVEDL2

Average customer rating:

On Food and Cooking, The Science and Lore of the Kitchen
Harold McGee
Manufacturer: Fireside/Simon & Schuster
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000PMZY72

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On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen
Harold; McGee, Harold J. McGee
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000OLSO0S

Average customer rating:

On Food and Cooking: the Science and Lore of the Kitchen
Harold J. Mcgee
Manufacturer: Scribner Book Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000N67SBU

Average customer rating:

On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen
Harold McGee
Manufacturer: SCRIBNER
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000OLKYMY

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